The gun used by illegal alien Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez in what he claims was an accidental fatal shooting of a woman on San Francisco’s Pier 14 on July 1 has been determined to have been stolen from an unidentified Bureau of Land Management agent. Sources told the San Francisco Chronicle that the .40-caliber pistol was the agent’s personal firearm and had been stolen from his automobile not long before the shooting.
Sanchez claimed that he found the gun wrapped in a T-shirt while sitting on a bench at the pier. “So I picked it up and … it started to fire on its own,” he told KGO-TV. “Then suddenly I heard that boom boom, three times.” Sanchez kicked the gun off the pier into San Francisco Bay and claimed he only realized he had shot someone when he was arrested by police hours later.
Sanchez pleaded not guilty on July 7 to first-degree murder. USA Today quoted a statement from Sanchez’ lawyer, Matt Gonzalez, the city’s number two public defender and a former member of the board of supervisors, who said: “very likely this was an accidental shooting.”
However, Assistant District Attorney Diana Garcia said that Sanchez should be denied bail, and called the killing “an act of random violence, shooting an innocent victim in the back.”
Whether Sanchez is ultimately convicted on either the murder charge or a lesser charge, or is exonerated, the facet of this case receiving the most attention is his release from the San Francisco jail despite his illegal status and past criminal record. Irate leaders on both sides of the political divide insist that he should have been turned over to immigration authorities for deportation.
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Among the voices insisting that the most important lesson to take away from the San Francisco killing is that illegal immigration must be curbed through stricter law enforcement was that of Donald Trump, an announced candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
“This senseless and totally preventable act of violence committed by an illegal immigrant is yet another example of why we must secure our border immediately,” Trump said in a statement on July 3. “This is an absolutely disgraceful situation and I am the only one that can fix it. Nobody else has the guts to even talk about it. That won’t happen if I become President.”
Trump’s assertion was proved untrue. As The New American reported Tuesday, Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was quite outspoken about the connection between our lax immigration policy and the San Francisco shooting when asked about it by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week program on July 5. When Stephanopoulos asked him “what went wrong” in San Francisco, Goodlatte answered:
Well, both … the federal government and San Francisco are wrong here, and George, let me say at the outset, what a tragedy for this family. My heart goes out to them. But quite frankly, the federal government, ICE knows about San Francisco’s sanctuary policy. It’s a bad policy but they know about it. Why did they turn him over to them when they could have deported him again or prosecuted him for illegally re-entering the country four [sic] times?
The San Francisco board of supervisors approved an ordinance in September 2013 that prohibited local law enforcement from complying with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers (requests that suspects be held until ICE agents can pick them up) unless the person in custody has a conviction for a violent crime such as murder, sexual assault, trafficking, or assault with a deadly weapon.
Sanchez had already been deported to Mexico five times, but after he completed his latest prison term for entering the country illegally in March, instead of doing the logical thing and deporting him again, ICE officials transferred him to San Francisco’s jail to face a 20-year-old charge of selling marijuana. Prosecutors dropped the drug charge, and despite an ICE detainer request to hold him for federal authorities so deportation proceedings could begin, they released him under San Francisco’s sanctuary policy.
The case has received so much national attention that even liberal Democrat politicians — who normally are lax on immigration law enforcement — have made statements critical of San Francisco’s sanctuary policy, or at least as to how it relates to this case.
During an interview with CNN’s Brianna Keilar on July 7, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that San Francisco was wrong to ignore the ICE detainer request and release Sanchez from custody. She stated:
I have absolutely no support for a city that ignores the strong evidence that should be acted on…. If it were a first-time traffic citation, if it were something minor, a misdemeanor, that’s entirely different. This man had already been deported five times. And he should have been deported at the request of the federal government.
The city made a mistake, not to deport someone that the federal government strongly felt should be deported. So I have absolutely no support for a city that ignores the strong evidence that should be acted on.
Though Clinton’s sentiment in this instance is basically correct, her knowledge of the deportation process seems rather clouded for a high-ranking public official. A city cannot deport anyone. What San Francisco should have done was to honor ICE’s detainer and turned Sanchez over to ICE for deportation.
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who herself served as San Francisco mayor from 1978 to 1988, urged San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee to start cooperating with federal immigration officials who want to deport felons.
“I strongly believe that an undocumented individual, convicted of multiple felonies and with a detainer request from ICE, should not have been released,” Feinstein said. “We should focus on deporting convicted criminals, not setting them loose on our streets.”
However, if Feinstein truly opposes the release of illegal aliens convicted of multiple felonies and believes that they should be deported, her focus should be directed toward Washington as well. As The New American noted in an article last October, there were nearly 167,000 convicted criminal aliens with final orders of removal who are still in the United States and “currently at large,” and under the Obama administration’s lax deportation policy deportations from the interior of the United States were 34 percent lower than the previous year.
Under the administration’s “prosecutorial discretion” policy, illegal aliens — even if they have compiled an additional criminal record — are being released in large numbers into our nation’s interior instead of being deported.
Related articles:
Congressman Criticizes Obama Administration for Releasing Illegal Alien Criminals
Authorities Cannot Tell If Aliens Have Fled ICE Program or Engaged in Criminal Acts
ICE Releases Additional 30,558 Criminal Aliens in FY 2014
Accused Cop-killer Was Twice-deported Illegal Immigrant
Obama Administration Has Released 167,000 Illegals With Criminal Records
Obama Administration Weakens Illegal Immigration Enforcement
Obama Administration Releases 68,000 Illegal Immigrant Criminals
